Research areas

Research Interests

I am interested in how single neurons in, say, visual cortex encode the spatio-chromatic information in visual scenes. Then, I am interested in how the responses of the neurons are used to determine human detection and perception of scenes, especially while they perform natural tasks. This involves psychophysical experiments with digitised photographs of natural scenes, and computational modelling of neuron receptive fields and their nonlinear interactions. Experimentally, I study how well people can detect differences between paired photographs and then I model how populations of visual cortex neurons might signal those differences.

Teaching

I lecture and/or organise Lab classes in neuroscience topics in Parts IB and II, and in Physiology of Organisms Part IA

Above: a simple cell in ferret visual cortex responds well to a photograph when there is a feature that just matches its receptive field configuration. (Journal of Neuroscience, 23, 4746-4759)

Above: presumably, you can easily tell that these two photographs differ, but...

...can you see the differences between these two photographs? A computer model of visual cortex neuronal responses suggests that the neurons can detect many differences but we, human observers, discard much of that (useless) in formation. (Journal of Vision, 10(4):12, 1‑22)